Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article analyzes the relationship between gender and taste at Shakespeare and Company. Using the *Shakespeare and Company Project* datasets, we discover that the majority of the books in the lending library were by men, and that women were almost twice as likely as men to borrow books by women. We also discover that the female authors with a high ratio of male to female readers are now canonical: Agatha Christie, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore. In contrast, the female authors with the highest ratio of female to male readers are less well-known: Margaret Kennedy, E. M. Delafield, Rebecca West, Elizabeth von Arnim. These final two discoveries are surprising: they suggest that the reading practices of men determined the canon of female authors, and that the reading practices of women might reveal a counterfactual canon of modernism. We consider how this counterfactual canon of female authors might influence future work in literary history.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.060 | 0.240 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".